


elegy for a righteous man

by crowroad



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Brother Feels, Episode: s15e20 Carry On, Grief/Mourning, Healing, Hurt/Comfort, Intervention, Post-Episode: s15e20 Carry On, Season/Series 15, Souls, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-14
Updated: 2020-12-14
Packaged: 2021-03-11 03:40:25
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,042
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28078587
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crowroad/pseuds/crowroad
Summary: Dean Winchester is alive forever.
Relationships: Dean Winchester & Sam Winchester
Comments: 8
Kudos: 34





	elegy for a righteous man

**Author's Note:**

  * For [LaughableLament](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LaughableLament/gifts).



> [LL](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LaughableLament/pseuds/LaughableLament), your Dean (s) are a gift, so this is for you. With much love!

At first, Dean is just gone. 

When you've made peace with--brokered, bargained, bound, eluded, deluded, resisted, read, unread, _murdered_ \--death, gone is difference, is other, is ash in aerosphere, world without ghost. 

Sam walks in a veil of his own working, hand-fast; aches in the place that tracks him back to Cold Oak, first time; not the last.

*****

Grief makes a place in the archives, in the spine of a grimoire, in that part of the map that lit up, where an angel once fell on Iowa, starburst a roadhouse roof; all the _smithereens_ , blown-tire loud, cut-crystal whiskey-spill, sad-salt spatula. Socket, rag, grease; casing. The bunker hums with it, lowers and surges and settles and speaks _: a man of letters has gone;_ _abiit sed numquam oblitus._

Sam runs his hands over anodynes, waxes--

poetic over vintage erotica.

*****

An angel is walking along an access road when it buckles and shudders and rumbles and he knows.

_Dean Winchester is dead._

_Dean Winchester is alive forever._

*****

News travels; it always does. What networks there are spark up—Lebanon to Lawrence to Wichita; Sioux Falls. Watchfires; hunters crouched over. Dark lit up with Bic, Zippo, flare. Light for peace, or war. Pour one out for him, man, a dude says; didn’t know him, but he saved my ass. He…what, went to hell, talked to god, did everything for--

his brother, someone else says, flicks ash into fire.

Word is he died ten times before it stuck.

Word is you shouldn’t say _Winchester_ three times in a mirror.

Word is there’ll never be another **.**

*****

Jody drinks homebrew, runs hands over the last dish Dean washed, buckshot Henley he left behind; thinks about good times, familystyle; wine and beans and birth control. _Absurd_. Her girls. Her gifts. Gun on her hip and the first time she knew monsters. Her boys. Her boy. She’ll thumb Sam’s number forty times, afraid to send.

*****

_Brother_ , Eileen signs, like a mantra, like signs could wash it away.

_Brother_ , Sam signs back, and it’s the most he’s said in hours. They’re bent over books in the bunker, nipping at whiskey, not talking, not talking; Sam’s shoulders bent-to, heavy with boughs.

If it was right, if it was the time, she’d tell him how she knew, first time she saw them together, how it was. Like sun always sinking behind them.

He asked me the sign for _totally fucked_ once, she’d say; he made me laugh so hard.

Nothing to tell that Sam doesn’t know.

*****

Sam could go mad and no-one would see. It’s happened before, hundreds of times.

Dean held his hand. That’s what does it.

Sam drives. Dog’s head out the window in a prairie wind.

*****

Nightingale, Nite-Owl, Black Rose; 5 am; all the truck-stop greasetrap smokes.

Waitress; traveler. Wrestlers. Psychics. Even the cops. Dads with toddlers ripped from ghosts, snatched from vamps, hauled back from dead like nothing. Even the railyard shifter; weres; all the monsters never named. Trailer-park fae; cowboy double; gunslinger, siren, desk-clerk; clown.

They all stop for a minute; go still, bleed if they can.

On every plane, that neon buzz.

*****

Donna brings Sam soup, or she would, if a case didn’t sound better.

Charlie leaves at the door: amaranth, asphodel, six lilies, _Metallica Live & Acoustic at the Masonic_; that’s for remembrance.

*****

The Queen sends minions home; seeds, in every place he ever was, a balm for every thousandth cut.

I know you were—

I know you were—

_gearradh flùraichean, mòran flùraichean,_

_There was no torture here._

From every fumarole of hell--

a night-garden tunnels up.

*****

Sam burns herbs in a bowl, breathes deep, scorches lines; inks just the way Max told him, kindling from the pyre, motherwort; thyme.

Witch it up all you want, says the man whose heart’s in a wicker cage—

Thing is your brother’s still real.

Just like the collateral; the ones he killed, the ones he saved.

Thing is he lives in you.

That was the hardest, with all this death and death and time—

to understand.

*****

Sam drives because sometimes, these days, Dean will talk to him:

_What’re you doing, kid._

_You promised me._

Sweet hum of the road; sweet hum of every bit—

of her, cradled and coaxed, built anew by reverent hands.

_Sammy,_ Dean says.

Breath on the mirror, almost for real.

_Take her slow._

*****

Kansas mourns. The most pathetic of pathetic fallacies, but fuck it, Sam thinks, all the—

great highways are full of ghosts, the plain the sky the driftless rise; these haunts; that house. That fire. Every interstate begins

and ends, right here. You always knew.

Kansas mourns.

*****

What do you want, the therapist says, for the next part of your life?

Facetime. No way he could speak to someone in person. She’s—specialist in trauma-informed grief counseling. Perfect fit.

There is no fit for what they were.

Look, Sam says, I--

You know that avoiding your grief, she says, is avoiding—

Yourself, Sam says, _because souls are suffering._

He doesn’t mean to be rude. But even the monsters know how to mourn.

Is there somewhere, the therapist says, you want to go?

Somewhere, Sam thinks, is a kid that could have been Dean’s (leathers; wrench in hand), grown now, with a faint flash of a man he’s forgotten, buzzing where angels have tread.

From somewhere, a litany:

_He was your brother._

_Afraid of nothing but flying._

_Made himself a million souls._

_Died and died and all for you._

_He knew himself. He knew the joy_

_that_ _comes in the morning_

_and cranked it up. And oh--_

_look, his jacket, his empties, his belt and his boot._

_This is **what** his soul is._

_This is **where** his soul is._

_It never left._

*****

An angel, once human, is walking along an access road talking to god, once the son of the devil; rolls the road up so careful, knit at the centerline, anodyne; time rushing and rumbling and rising, eating its own wake.

*****

Sam drives, brothershape in shotgun or--

a dog in a new collar, soft-salt midwest horizon:

_Don’t douche up my dog, Sammy, way you once did my car._

Sometimes Dean is still here.

Warmth like a river; roadway running his spine like fire.

Somewhere is sunup on the day they retire.

Sam drives.


End file.
